Geraldine Brooks, author most recently of The Secret Chord and host this month of the WSJ Book Club, has chosen Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead as the book club's latest pick, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Over the next several weeks, the WSJ Book Club will be reading Gilead (Picador), with discussion questions posted on the Journal's Speakeasy blog. Readers are invited to join the conversation on the club's Facebook page, or follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #WSJBookClub. Brooks will ultimately join the club for a live video chat about the novel.
"The language is exquisite," Brooks said of Gilead. "The observations are breathtaking and so original and unexpected. I think there's some pyrotechnics in here, but it's virtuosity rather than showing off. It's a masterpiece of voice. And it's very challenging to do what she's done. She created an entirely good, entirely sympathetic protagonist who at the same time is fully human and deeply sympathetic and wholly plausible. So you really feel that you know this John Ames and you're on his side in the world. And I think her exacting depiction of what it feels like to love a child, the totality of that love--I don't know of anybody else who's captured that so perfectly."
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President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa State Library (photo: Pete Souza/White House) |
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Even President Barack Obama is a Gilead fan. In a recent conversation with Robinson that is being published in the New York Review of Books, he said: "I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa.... And I've told you this--one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just--I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book, and then you and I had a chance to meet when you got a fancy award at the White House. And then we had dinner and our conversations continued ever since."